Video Overview

#3 episode of Helping B2B High Ticket Service Providers Grow – One Lesson at a Time, with the Founder of the podcast “Talking with the Experts” – Rose Davidson.

As certain conditions occurred and affected the whole world, some things had a different turn.

Being an online event manager, Rose surely cherished the out-of-nowhere opportunity.

She talks about the benefits her business had from the sudden wave of digitalization. But, also about the cons and flaws of the online events.

STAY TUNED for more incredible lessons, stories and growth tips, straight from the most successful entrepreneurs!

Speakers

Interview Transcript

[00:00:06.740] – Dancho – Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Helping B2B High Ticket Service Providers Grow – One Lesson at a Time. As you already know by now, my name is Dancho Dimkov, and I’m the host, and every episode I’ll actually invite different people that have a very fantastic story to share and great insight. For today, we have Rose Davidson on the call. Rose, welcome.

[00:00:31.210] – Rose – Thank you Dancho. It’s lovely to be here. And congratulations on the new podcast. It’s pretty exciting.

[00:00:38.210] – Dancho – Thank you very much. A side note, actually, was it a few months ago or actually last month where I actually was a guest on Rose podcast, and I really had a great time, and she was one of the people that inspired me, actually, to start this podcast. So thank you very much Rose for that, as well.

[00:00:53.160] – Rose – You’re welcome. Podcasting is the way to go now. I do believe is the new way to learn.

[00:01:01.440] – Dancho – Exactly. Well, I’ve realized that some people want to read, other ones to see what videos, group of people just want audio. And we just want to be able to reach to different target audience. And, Rose, I’m sure that I know you’re pretty good, but I would love to give you some introduction by you on who you are and what you do for everybody that are meeting you for the first time.

[00:01:24.310] – Rose – Okay. Hello, everyone. My name is Rose Davidson. My business is rosedavidson.com. And I am an online event manager, is my main role.

[00:01:36.090] – Dancho – Nice!

[00:01:38.850] – Rose – I teach people to take their offline events and put them online because of the way that the world is spinning these days, you can’t always rely on having an in person event. So you need to be able to pivot at the last minute and be able to take your inperson event to an online format just at the pin of a wheel, because nothing is certain these days and lockdowns happen well, in Australia they happen at the top of the hack.

[00:02:09.670] – Dancho – Yeah. Well, Interestingly Rose, corona positively, I assume, affected your business, because if you’re doing online events, people were pushed toward digital transformation and all the physical events started looking like, okay, we haven’t done it online so far. What should we do? Which direction should we take?

[00:02:29.740] – Rose – Yes. Very true. A lot of it was to do with that, you know, speaking, speaking events just dried up, and a lot of speakers just gave up and did other things because they couldn’t book any venues and a lot of consultants and those people that actually give in person events just disappeared off the planet for a time until everything settled down. But now everything’s just so uncertain because, you know, you could be rolling along one day for weeks and weeks and weeks. And all of a sudden, you know, Covid comes and everyone’s in locked down and you can’t do anything about it. So you need to be able to take that event online and be able to coordinate or confer with your audience to just let them know that there’s no in person event anymore. We are doing it online, and this is how you go about doing it.

[00:03:25.010] – Dancho – Yeah, and I’m really curious. People had physical events. Now during the Corona, everybody had to choose to move to the online. But now when things are slowly going back to normal, did some of the people decide to continue just online? They’ve realized that with physical events, you need a location, you need logistics, you need people physically to come in. While with the online, I mean, you just open Zoom and you can just talk just like we are currently doing.

[00:03:49.220] – Rose – A lot of people are doing hybrid events now. So they’re part in person and part online. They are finding that, I think they get a bigger range of an audience that way, because some people like in person events because of the interaction that you get. It’s like talking to a camera. You can’t really see at the other side of the camera who’s watching. You can’t see their face. You could be making faces at me right at the moment, and I wouldn’t know.

[00:04:21.090] – Dancho – Yeah.

[00:04:22.210] – Rose – That’s the difficulty of online events is that you have no no personal interaction. There’s no body language. You can’t you just can’t say who you’re speaking to, where in personal event, you get feedback from the audience just with a look on their face, if they’re engaged, if they’re playing with their phones or doing whatever they’re doing.

[00:04:41.980] – Dancho – Speaking honestly Rose, we do some trainings. And when you do physical training, you can see the people whether they’re looking like, I have no idea what you just said, but they’re like, yeah, yeah, exactly. And then that feedback is really important when you’re trying to do a speaking event or actually any kind of training.

[00:04:59.690] – Rose – Yeah, it is a lot. And this is the thing that a lot of the speakers had to get over with, the fact that there’s been no feedback at the other side of the camera, they wouldn’t know. They’d just be giving you their presentation, and they wouldn’t know what, who was watching or what was happening behind the scenes. So it was always good to have someone to help them behind the scenes, that they could keep the audience engaged while the speaker was speaking. This is one of the services that I actually offer is to work behind the scenes for a speaker or consultant who’s giving a workshop. And that way I can still keep the audience entertained and ask them questions. While the speaker is speaking and not to get…

[00:05:41.480] – Dancho – Distracted.

[00:05:43.680] – Rose – Yeah, distracted from what the speaker was saying, so that they’re still engaged. And that means the speaker still engaged because they can read the chat later and say, oh, yeah, and get back to that person and answer that particular question.

[00:05:59.060] – Dancho – That’s really, really interesting. So actually, if I’m a speaker, you’re taking care of the entire event. It’s not just setting up to the online, but like the logistics, the promotion, all the aspects of the online event, you’re taking care of Rose?

[00:06:14.020] – Rose – Yes, I do. I make all the templates for them, they need to do their own marketing. I won’t do that for them. I will help them, but I won’t do it for them because I that’s not my thing, marketing, but during the creative side of it is and then sitting with them, whether it’s online, I’m in a different state or different country, I can still monitor the chat online for them while they’re giving their presentation and just keeping the audience engaged.

[00:06:44.540] – Dancho – Nice. Well, I assume that you need to juggle between a lot of hats within these services, because if you’re making an event online, you need to also have some technical understanding and you need to know what works and what doesn’t. So when it comes to expertise, I’m sure that you don’t have just one expertise, but plenty of different ones. But for the sake of this guest recording, we are always around one expertise that you’re proud of, the one expertise that you really think that you want to share with the rest of the world.

[00:07:18.660] – Rose – Yeah. I really love to make PowerPoint presentations. I like the creativity of it. I like putting the animations in, and I like finding the graphics, and I like being able to make the little people move, I think that’s the coolest thing out. It’s not as good as being an animator, which one day I hope to learn how to do that, to animate things. But in the meantime, I have PowerPoint, and I can actually turn them into video and then play with it that way. So I have no qualms, whatsoever.

[00:07:52.510] – Dancho – Nice. I’m thinking Rose, at the moment, people have native app. Some people really know how to express them in PowerPoint. Other people are worth type. They just open a Word and they start typing in a Word. Third type, I actually fall in the third one, I’m an Excel guy. If you give me an Excel, everything is there, even text, even charts, even everything. And the PowerPoint requires creativity because it gives you the opportunity to express yourself much better. So I’m curious, is it hard to be transferred from an Excel guy who wants the numbers and the analytics to a PowerPoint?

[00:08:28.980] – Rose – No, because I think a numbers person like yourself would love PowerPoint because really, numbers are creative. And so as PowerPoint, you get to use probably a different side of your brain, which is a good exercise for your brain.

[00:08:49.840] – Dancho – Nice. Well, I realized that the PowerPoint can have many usages. In your case, the most PowerPoint that you’re doing are for the presenters, for the online events cases?

[00:09:01.820] – Rose – Yeah. Sometimes I do them for I can make the PowerPoint up, and then I make it into a video for people so that they can actually run it in the background rather than press the clicker. I haven’t had a lot of call for that because I don’t think people actually realize that they can have a PowerPoint turned into a video. So that’s something that I probably need to push that a bit further.

[00:09:30.000] – Dancho – Yeah, really, I didn’t know.

[00:09:30.360] – Rose – Yeah. You can turn it into a video. You can actually, in the slide shaper. You can actually save it as a video, but you still have to click through it to keep the timing right. So that’s up to the person who created the PowerPoint, but it’s really cool because you get to see all the animations work at the end. It’s really neat.

[00:09:51.680] – Dancho – No, nice. I haven’t tried that one. I mean, when it comes to PowerPoint presentation as a company, we’ve done for sales purposes, creating a short presentation or for pitch for business plan competition, where you create, like a five to ten slides deck, which needs to be really summarized and really well thought. And I was really struggling with that part. Honestly, Rose, when it comes to aesthetics, it’s one thing I know my numbers, but then how to make them appealing on PowerPoint, it’s not something that anybody can do it as simple as you’re saying it.

[00:10:25.500] – Rose – Well, I guess there’s horses for courses, Dancho. People are good at what they do and they brain-wide to do it or they’re not. Some people can paint beautiful masterpieces, and other people can grow a six-figures. So it’s much like that. I mean, I can’t draw to save myself, but I love doing these because, and I’ve actually worked on a PowerPoint recently with 68 slides long.

[00:10:55.790] – Dancho – Wow!

[00:10:57.230] – Rose – And honestly, I had about ten lines of text on it, like ten foot bullet points on each side for about 20 slides. Oh my God. You know, why are you having to say so much? You’re suppose to talk to the slide, you’re not supposed to be reading from it. And it was just giving me a headache. With the text all miss-aligned. And the images and graphics didn’t go with the text because, but they just put something in there because it looked pretty, but it had nothing to do with the topic on that particular slide at all.

[00:11:39.910] – Dancho – Yeah. Funny that you mentioned many times when we see PowerPoint people are like just copy it from the Word document, paste it into the PowerPoint slide, and then just Hello, everybody, and start just reading, reading, reading, reading.

[00:11:53.330] – Rose – Nothing less. But this is why we have presented you in PowerPoint so that you can have one screen open, which has got all your slides and it’s not showing, it got your complete slide, it’s not showing the little slides at the side, and then you can read, you can refer to your notes if you’ve been clever enough to add notes to your slides on a different screen so that no one’s going to know that you’re reading from the because your slides are up and everyone can see them. And there’s no notes under, you are the presenter, you know that there are notes that you’re referring to.

[00:12:32.740] – Dancho – Yeah, actually, I started now using the notes on the bottom, but I think it is really like an evolution. When you start using slides, you put all the Word. Then you start realizing that it’s boring. Then you start making bullet points as a reminder to yourself on what is the topic that you need to do, but you need to get there. So I was curious, Rose, how did you get to become really an expert in PowerPoint?

[00:12:57.240] – Rose – I taught myself, and then I just looked at other people how they were doing their PowerPoint and I asked questions. And there’s one lady in America, she’s an absolute whiz at them, and she can do stuff that I can’t do. I’ve learned a lot from her just by watching what she does. And if I don’t know, something I gave to Mr. Google, because Mr. Google knows everything.

[00:13:23.540] – Dancho – I assume that there are also some very nice templates that you can at least start from?

[00:13:30.620] – Rose – Yes. I actually have a subscription for 3D PowerPoint presentation. So there’s a lot of animated characters and animated templates that I use, and you can just take a graph out of one of them and put it into another PowerPoint presentation. And no one will know that you haven’t actually made it up yourself. And it goes up and down. All the lines move and the balls move up and down. It’s really cool. I really love that. The subscription is not expensive, and it’s a lifetime subscription, so I don’t really care.

[00:14:10.910] – Dancho – Yeah, I’m thinking that a few years back, like, a lot of years back, people were hiring animators to actually make this kind of animation. And now with PowerPoint, you can just take it from some other template and copy it on your.

[00:14:23.960] – Rose – Yeah, you can actually do morphing in PowerPoint, so you can actually, a series of slides looks like an animation. I haven’t got, I’ve never tried it once, and it was really thrilling for me to learn how to do that, but I’ve not had any need to do it. It was only for my own pleasure. And maybe people don’t know that you can actually do that in PowerPoint, actually make it into an animation by morphing their slides, but yeah, it was really cool. I really liked it.

[00:14:54.680] – Dancho – I’m really enjoying this. I realized that I should try a bit with the PowerPoint. I was like, in my head, when I need to do something, I just opened a new spreadsheet and I still write text and stuff. But, you know, I can relate to the numbers, and I’m more on the columns and rows, and I’m interested, Rose, I mean, as you’ve done a lot of PowerPoint presentation, and you’ve seen even more on what’s good and what’s bad, what’s the single lesson that you want to share? And we’re joking here, like, if you want to be remembered by the one thing in the world that you’ve said, you know what? Whatever you do, don’t do this or do this. When it comes to the PowerPoint presentation, what would be that one lesson?

[00:15:42.840] – Rose – Oh, my goodness. I mean, I’ve seen so many bad things, but I guess the one lesson is to keep it simple. So use the KIS principles, keep it simple, stupid.

[00:15:54.120] – Dancho – Yeah. I have heard that often. And you’re right there, because when I see populated slides, as you said, ten bullet points plus three images, it’s like, where should I look now? Where should I start from?

[00:16:06.200] – Rose – That’s exactly right. And then people are too busy looking at the slide and they’re not listening to you, you are reading from, you know, your notes. So it’s distracting to the audience, and they quickly lose patience with you. And either they walk out or they start playing with their phones or they are thinking about what they’re going to get for dinner or whatever. They’re not paying attention. I guess the one thing I really want to share is just keep it simple. Don’t over complicate what you do. It’s distracting, it’s boring. And, you know, there’s nothing worse than sitting through a presentation that is dead with PowerPoint.

[00:16:49.460] – Dancho – Yeah, and now, with the online presentation, I can just open a new tab, Facebook and continue scrolling while you’re actually trying to give your best presentation.

[00:16:58.840] – Rose – That correct. Yes. And I don’t certainly don’t want that when I’m giving my presentations, I don’t want people to be distracted. So I try to make my slides nice looking and aesthetically pleasing as possible, but not too busy so that they having to read the whole slide and absolutely not listening to what I’m saying.

[00:17:19.540] – Dancho – Yeah, nice. You’re spot on there, Rose. And I was curious for PowerPoint, you have Microsoft PowerPoint. Are there any tools that are similar to that or better?

[00:17:29.960] – Rose – Yeah. Apple Key keynotes is very similar to PowerPoint. You can actually download Microsoft PowerPoint or Keynote, and a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation, you can actually turn that into a keynote. Or the other way around. You can still do that, but you need to have keynote downloaded on your PC, and it doesn’t, they don’t talk to each other very well. I did very nice slide presentation to somebody recently, and I didn’t realize that she was a Mac user, and so when she opened up the slides, of course, they weren’t lined up anything like I’ve sent them. And I was so disappointed because I’ve spent, like, two days on these slides.

[00:18:19.960] – Dancho – Wow.

[00:18:20.990] – Rose – It was a long time and so she decided not to use them. And I was so disappointed because she’s not a tech-savvy person. So even though I sent her instructions, really clear instructions on how to convert the slides from PowerPoint to Keynote, she couldn’t work it out. And she got frustrated and she just gave up. And she wouldn’t even let me, like, share screens with her to walk her through the process. That’s how frustrated she was. And to me, it was really disappointing because she paid me money to make up these slides and then she’s not going to use them. And I think that’s just a waste of both of our time. But what do you do. So you have to be mindful of that, if you’re using a Mac, which has Keynote and your VA or whoever that you’re getting to do your side is a Microsoft user, you need to remember that you need to tell each other what programs you’re using so that they can make allowances. It’s really, really important.

[00:19:20.460] – Dancho – Well, that is an important lesson on the site record to beware in which platform are you using. But you mentioned something I wanted to ask. What is a normal time to create a good PowerPoint presentation? I mean, I don’t know even how to benchmark. Is it, actually, on average, how much usually did it take to create a PowerPoint presentation in time?

[00:19:44.660] – Rose – It takes me a little bit longer time to make them if I have to start from scratch. If I’ve already got a presentation to work on and tidying it up doesn’t take me as long because I just really need to just either change the images or make them look a bit more pretty by putting bevels around them all, do whatever and just line up the text. So, you know, a 68 slide deck it took me two days, but that wasn’t working constantly, because you can’t just sit there and just do Powerpoints all day because it’s…

[00:20:25.900] – Dancho – Yeah. It’s exhausting, the creative part of the brain.

[00:20:29.940] – Rose – Yeah. I have coffee breaks.

[00:20:33.140] – Dancho – Yeah. Well, that’s why I was curious, because people when they say PowerPoint in someone’s head, it’s like, that’s like five minutes to just put the text in and that’s it. For someone is like a week. And I just wanted to get the idea. So it’s like a few days…

[00:20:49.870] – Rose – I’m too fussy to just go and set something on a slide and say that’s pretty. No, sorry.

[00:20:57.140] – Dancho – Exactly. Well Rose, what are the plans for you in the future? I’m curious to see where your business is headed or where do you want to drive it in the future?

[00:21:08.140] – Rose – I would like to drive it to be the person that people come to to get the PowerPoint slides made or their online events organized. I want to have a team working for me. At this moment I’m just doing it by myself. But two or three years down the track, I’d like to have a team working for me.

[00:21:35.280] – Dancho – Nice, having a whole team and be the go-to guy. You need a PowerPoint, I know a girl.

[00:21:41.840] – Rose – Yeah.

[00:21:42.770] – Dancho – Nice. If anybody is interested, actually, to give their presentation for you to review, or if they need help for a complete building of a PowerPoint, or even if they need help with an online event, where can people find your Rose?

[00:21:59.100] – Rose – Well, I have website is at rose-davidson.com, or they can email me at hello@rose-davidson.com. You can find me on Facebook at Rose Davidson. And yeah, LinkedIn at Rose Davidson.

[00:22:19.900] – Dancho – Yeah. I was actually communicating with you on Linkedin.

[00:22:22.839] – Rose – You were.

[00:22:24.010] – Dancho – At least I knew that we can find you on LinkedIn as well.

[00:22:27.380] – Rose – Yeah. Website, Facebook, PowerPoint, or email. It’s probably the easiest place to find me.

[00:22:33.720] – Dancho – Yeah, exactly. Rose, I found this very insightful as I was taking notes, now I’m looking like, okay, one thing that I really realized that I should be careful is that look at the present view, put the notes in the bottom, not inside the slide, so it won’t be boring. That’s really useful. To keep it simple, the KIS model, it really needs to have a presentation that is appealing rather than put everything like 10,20 bullet points.

[00:23:00.570] – Rose – Well, the audience is your primary target. You don’t make your slide presentation to please you.

[00:23:06.960] – Dancho – Yeah, actually entertain them.

[00:23:09.960] – Rose – You have to make your audience happy.

[00:23:14.560] – Dancho – And the third thing that I wrote here is beware between PowerPoint and Apple keynotes. They don’t always integrate as smooth as you’re hoping to. And yeah, there’s no way me as a normal guy would know these things. And actually, that’s why I wanted this kind of interviews, because as we’re learning new stuff, I’m like I never actually thought because I’m a Microsoft guy my whole life, and I was never even considered that, yeah, well, if I send someone a PowerPoint and they’re in the Apple ecosystem, they might have problems and conversions and stuff, which I don’t know. I’d never had that kind of thought because I’m a Microsoft my whole life.

[00:23:51.860] – Rose – Yeah, me too. I knew Keynote existed, but I didn’t realize it was…

[00:24:01.660] – Dancho – Well, Rose, I really appreciate you coming on as a guest. Thank you very much for your time and for everybody else. If you need a PowerPoint or an online event, feel free to reach out to Rose. You’ll realize that she does magic there.

[00:24:16.510] – Rose – Dancho, thank you so much. It’s been such a pleasure.

[00:24:19.860] – Dancho – Yeah. Have a great day, Rose and thank you again.

[00:24:23.240] – Rose – You too. Bye.